Trending

Say you are president. You thunder about how your predecessor’s bailouts let corporate execs keep big bonuses at taxpayer expense. That won’t happen on your watch!

And then it does. AIG bigwigs take $165 million.

So you are angry at yourself, for signing that stimulus bill with its specific language permitting TARP recipients to pay bonuses if bonuses were part of contracts made before February of ’09.

Maybe somebody should have read the legislation. So who has that job? Besides you . . . I mean the president himself. Why, Congress, of course!

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley said he would at least “feel better” were AIG executives to apologize and then either “resign or go commit suicide.”

Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd and New York Sen. Chuck Schumer advocate passing a special tax to confiscate all the bonus money ex post facto.

Dodd didn’t mention that he had authored the provision specifically permitting the AIG bonuses. He has now said he’ll return the $280,000 in donations he’s received from AIG executives. Schumer was mum about his $112,000 from those same execs.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said, “We’ve got to do whatever it takes to make sure people that basically ripped off the American people weren’t able to profit from it.”

Related Posts

3 Comments

The vilification of those who produce wealth, & those who profit from their work & expertise, has now reached idiotic proportions. Chartered buses take protesters to homes in suburban Connecticut, to march outside the homes of those financial types. Nothing like threatening the executives, their wives, & especially their kids, is there?! The attitude apparently is, since I hate you & I think all should share equally (despite the fact many of these protester folks cannot even balance their checkbooks, let alone run serious financial companies), its OK for me & my buddies to advocate actual violence against you & yours. After all, the utopia we were promised by “the one” could be threatened unless we find ways to force you to comply with the dream!
The credit derivatives market was s scam that should put some in jail. BUT. We cannot just stop functioning financially. That suicide would mean all will suffer a lot more than in the Great Depression. And attacking people you think are responsible for something, simply solves nothing, but it does cause some who are attacked to seek equally violent solutions or protections.
The truth is, our people re protesting the wrong people. This was ALL caused by politicians in Washington. They allowed the credit derivatives to exist & be written. They allowed regulations to be stymied by people like Barney Frank, under the guise of racism, when in fact the proposed regulations by McCain, even George Bush, & many others, were good financial solutions that would have kept the markets solvent. Yes they would have limited or slowed the loans to poor people. BUT, those same poor people are among the largest group defaulting on loans they should never have been allowed to take out! Washington allowed those bad loans to be bundled into those credit derivative instruments & Washington allowed those credit derivatives to be marketed as “AAA” bonds, when they were no such thing at all & had investors known the poor quality of the bonds they would never have bought them. But even AIG investors were duped into thinking those bonds were good stuff. So its easy to see anyone could have been duped, except those who seriously under- stand those instruments. That list of people is extremely short.
But Washington knew. Frank, Dodd & a host of others had already been briefed on the volatility of these bonds, yet they did not act. After all, even if they go bad, all it meant was ALL Americans would have to help keep the poor in their homes. The socialist idea was, lets not worry about spreading the wealth, lets spread the poverty! And now we all have to deal with this mess.
Washington created the instruments, blocked specific regulations (despite the allegations regulations were not written because of those terrible Republicans), that would have staved off this mess, Washington allowed corporate executives to provide cover for themselves & the politicians who enabled them, & Washington is making this worse by spending us into bankruptcy.
Too bad Republicans do not know how to articulate this to the people in an understandable manner, so the public could decide to throw out the right bums the next time around.
Even if Republicans were bad guys, none of those actions were going to drive us into financial collapse. What the Democrats are doing will. Add to this the socialist policies & the plans for citizen corps service groups, & so many other plans to force us to be even more dependent on Washington, & what we have is the dismantling of the Constitutional Republic once known as America!

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Name *

Email *

Website

8 × = 72

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

About

Support This Site

Your gift to Citizens in Charge Foundation for Common Sense is fully tax-deductible and 100 percent will go to the support and expansion of this site. Be part of Team 1776 by making a contribution or a monthly pledge today.

Thought of the Day

It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and …Read More »